Very thoughtful article on investing in medical data.

Fifteen years ago, I indentified data businesses as good place for venture capital investing. Being located in New York, I found investing in core technology to be hard. Data businesses had similar return characteristics and there were a lot more of them in places I could get to easily.

And I identified three areas that I thought were particularly interesting; financial data, marketing data, and medical data.

and

But HIPAA has set the rules. And my experience in the marketing data world suggests that once the rules are set, the data starts to flow. The absence of rules is a bigger deterrent to data moving because nobody wants to do anything wrong. Now with the rules set, data is going to flow.

Very thoughtful. I aspire to be this articulate about our investment thinking.

Save this link from Rich re how to get bluetooth audio to work with XP, i am going to run into this

* As mentioned I love rollyo.  Just created a HalloweenPlans searchroll.  How do I link directly to this?  Not clear. * Like Chris I hate BetaPlace.  It makes getting beta bits so hard, I just tend to give up. * Roundup of web-based productivity apps.  I need a great XL and PPT replacement. * An incredibly easy-to-use wiki continues to appeal to me.  I’m not the only one.  People seem excited about jotlive * Process Library – another guide to all those damn things running on your machine.  I’m partial to answers that work but sometimes you have to triangulate * Netvibes seems really cool – i thought about creating a little ignition blog portal with it – but it has problems with logins and remembering your content.  worth watching tho. * Swik from our friends at sourcelabs. Cool.

Love the idea of Rollyo.  Phil and I spent some time talking about custom search scoping a while ago and phil built a little tool to do it.  Now rollyo has turned it into a complete service.  great idea.

* Martin on camping close to Seattle * Top 10 waterproof tech items.  Really for divers but in our wet conditions, some good things in here to keep cameras and ipods dry * Tips for ultralight backpacking.  Now if someone would just come up with ultralight water… * Over the next couple years need to look at boats for daytrips around lopez island – corsairmarine, southpawboats, parkerboats, customweld all seem worth looking at.  Want zero maintenance and high durability.

Only 3 days left.  Also Jason describes his experience at high-speed business development – speed-dating to meet customers.  I wonder if it works.

OK I screwed up a little bit on my move to MT3.2. My archive naming scheme changed because I blew away my old blog. And I exported and reimported all my entries. As a result I was left with a lot of old archive entries, expecting my old CSS, but getting my new CSS so they looked like crap. I forced a rebuild of all the old pages but because of the entry export/import, all my entry numbers were different.

As a result, search engines are now pointing to pages that look ok but have the wrong content. Sorry. If you use the searchbox on this page here you will find the right content. Search engines will eventually catch up.

Nice to see ATI’s alternative to SLI out.  Looks reasonably performant tho I think I will stick with SLI for my next machine, there are just so many SLI choices out there.

Rich’s new methodology for valuing current and prospective investments.  Not as bad a metric as some of the lame constructs we’ve come up with.  Make sure you put your current and projected Alexa ranking on the first page of your pitch deck when you come to visit us.

Rocketpost, another blog editing client. Nice looking, pretty full featured.  One brilliant feature – copy a link from your browser or aggregator, select text in your post, and CTRL-J turns the text into a link.  Huge huge time savings.  Nice work Manish.

Week 5 poll up.  For me the top 4 were easy – SC, Texas, Va Tech all look great and are undefeated, and OSU has the best D I’ve seen and an emerging offense.  I have deep questions about the rest of the poll – some teams have gaudy records but haven’t been tested, others have been tested but haven’t looked impressive.   Still a long season ahead of us.

The Jobster team launched their revised site this week…now the service is usable by job seekers…way to go guys! (Ignition is an investor).

* Phil thinks it would be great to listen to podcasts on his cellphone. Totally agree. I would listen to like 10x as many if I could use the cell. * Phil talks about Jobster’s culture and how they encourage innovation – lifting the 20% idea from Google. * Phil on the latest features in Berry411. I fyou have a blackberry and don’t have berry411, get going!

Maybe this entry should just be called “keeping up with phil”. Oh wait, Rich on online sites for trading in mileage points. Good stuff, I have a lot of idle miles.

* Subvert from within – great tips on how to remain focused on the customer, even within a large org. Totally relevant to team members in orgs of all sizes. (from geekman.com) * Google’s use of prediction markets internally. I wonder how many participants you need to make this work well. * NetworthIQ. If this was done in depth, allowing users to compare investment strategies and particular investments, that’d be pretty powerful. * A VC’s view of web2.0 investing. Good points. Like the observation that these services can be built and trialed very inexpensively. That seems like the right first step to me – no point in investing huge gobs of time and dollars if no one cares about an initial quick implementation. * Same guy on games investing – “Despite the incredible market size numbers, gaming, as a category, hasn’t produced many significant wins for venture investors. I think this will change as the underlying technology continues to improve and as people–not just kids–spend an increasing amount of time and dollars playing games.”

Per the NCAA stats site, OSU is #1 in rushing defense. And against good quality opposition. Definitely having a national championship year on defense, and the offense is perking up. A fun team to watch right now.